Oscar Isaac and Catherine Keener Present Your New Podcast Obsession

A few months ago, at eight A.M. on a Saturday, Catherine Keener was standing in a field in Red Hook, New York, preparing for a scene. Her crew of three and her scene partner, David Schwimmer, had settled on this quiet, remote location after first trying a city back alley (too much construction), then a cemetery (under the flight path of J.F.K. Airport).

Then, disastrously, a bass line started thumping as a nearby electronica music festival started its sound check. Keener hurried over to the festival to sweet talk them into giving her little crew just 15 extra minutes, then rushed back to, finally, record.

It was just another day on the set of Homecoming—which is not a bold indie or a fancy streaming TV series, but an experimental-fiction podcast. Featuring stars like Keener, Schwimmer, Oscar Isaac, Amy Sedaris, and David Cross, it’s a bold charge into a new frontier of storytelling—one that still doesn’t quite have a name.

Homecoming is far from the first fictional podcast on the market. Creepy thrillers like Limetown, The Message, and Welcome to Nightvale have been shooting up the iTunes charts for a few years now. But Homecoming, from venture-capital-funded podcast network Gimlet Media, is the first to lure honest-to-god movie stars to act for microphones, and to help the show stand out in an increasingly crowded market. “It’s so confusing to me also,” Homecoming creator and executive producer Eli Horowitz told Vanity Fair of his all-star cast. “We decided to start with our dreams. We made a list, and Catherine Keener was at the top of it.”

Keener—whose background in experimental indie films might have made her more open to taking a storytelling risk—stars as Heidi, a woman who once worked in an experimental program re-acclimating veteran soldiers into civilian life. Keener brought her Show Me a Hero co-star Isaac on board to play one of those veterans, Walter Cruz. She then roped in Schwimmer—who directed her in the 2010 film Trust—to play Heidi’s boss. Keener’s connections “made it a family affair” Horowitz said, “and made everyone more willing to take a chance on this sort of thing.” The plot of Homecoming leaps back and forth between the first time Heidi met Walter and several years into the future where Keener’s character is hiding out and the entire organization is under investigation.

Podcast acting is not a bad gig; Keener, the star of the show, only recorded for one week, and Schwimmer just for a day. Roping in the very best actors was vital, as Gimlet co-founder Alex Blumberg points out, to selling the authenticity of a pure audio narrative. “Movies can withstand a bad actor,” he points out, “if the picture is good enough or the action is cool enough. Keanu Reeves’s career is built on that. His beauty and the action surrounds him on-screen surpasses his ability to act. In a podcast, that is impossible. It depends entirely on the skill of the actors because it’s down to them to deliver emotional truth.”

Between the level of talent and the character-driven storytelling, Homecoming has more in common with HBO prestige dramas than some of the other genre-focused fictional podcasts that preceded it. (Horowitz, for the record, was “grossed out” when I suggested “prestige podcast” as a name for what he’s produced.) And though the audience for podcasts is booming—a recent Edison Research study found that 21 percent of all Americans listens to podcasts—there’s clearly room for growth with an older demographic much less interested in popping those earbuds. “To really break through and become a major part of the media landscape,” Jay Baer of the digital marketing site Convince & Convert wrote back in May, “podcasts must become a habit for older Americans. Just 11% of Americans 55+ listen to podcasts monthly.”

Homecoming, with its sterling credentials, is the kind of thing that could hook that older audience, and Blumberg is keenly aware of that fact. He suggests that the 79 percent of Americans who don’t listen to podcasts “haven’t found a fiction podcast they like. Maybe something like Nightvale or Limetown—maybe that genre isn’t to their liking. Maybe they like a police procedural, or sports dramas. There aren’t any of those in podcasting—there’s a lot of room to grow.”

Homecoming, with its intimate conversations, definitely relies on some of the classic storytelling techniques of Golden Age audio drama. But Blumberg and Horowitz also reject the term “audio drama,” deeming it too “stodgy.” They specifically don’t want*“Homecoming* to lean as heavily into intentional nostalgia the way, say, Garrison Keillor’s popular Prairie Home Companion series did. And one way they’re giving their story of Heidi and Walter a modern edge has to do with, no surprise, technology.

While all of the outdoor scenes were filmed outside (like that one in Red Hook), most were filmed in the Gimlet studios, taking advantage of how far audio design has come since the era of Foley artists knocking coconut shells together for horse hooves. “We have digital editing and sound-effect libraries,” Blumberg explains. “So you have buttons like ‘Big Barn,’ ‘Small Barn,’ ‘Big Barn Full,’ ‘Small Barn Full,’ and you can put these effects on something, and all [of a] sudden the voice sounds like it’s in that kind of room. So the concept of radio drama may sound old and dusty, but you can make one that feels totally contemporary.”

As the former popular host of NPR’s Planet Money, Blumberg knows that one of the addictive allures of podcasts is the cult of personality that springs up around a given show’s hosts. (In addition to these being the one type of media you can consume while doing your errands, commuting, exercising outdoors, etc.) “People feel like they know you,” he explains. “And that’s because they do.”

Listeners come to think of hosts as friends; it’s why names like Sarah Koenig, Ira Glass, Joe Rogan, Doug Benson, and Cecil Gershwin Palmer (the alter-ego of Nightvale narrator Cecil Baldwin) are uttered with such reverence in certain households. Fiction can’t provide that same intimacy. “I was worried about that,” Blumberg admits. “Is fiction working at odds with what audio is good at?”

But Homecoming is ingeniously structured to specifically tap into what makes non-fiction podcasts so popular. Eschewing manipulative cliff-hangers (a device even Serial couldn’t resist), and stagey narration, the show is structured as what Horowitz calls “uncurated found audio.” Listeners have to piece together a mystery via overheard conversations, and phone calls—focusing in on the unfolding drama over the din of a restaurant or a crowded airport. Horowitz was so committed to avoiding any “inevitable staginess” that he handed his actors a plate, utensils, and food for scenes in which they were supposed to be eating.

This “uncurated” approach has been used extremely effectively in recent, popular narrative video games like Her Story. Trying to emulate the appealing authenticity of non-fiction podcasts, Horowitz says he doesn’t want his listeners to feel the artifice of being pushed into a story. He prefers that they think of the show as “an artifact you’re discovering or an overheard conversation.”

Angling towards an untapped demographic and cleverly constructed to be the most authentic piece of fiction you may hear all year, Homecoming is primed to make a big splash in the podcasting world. Horowitz even hints that there may be a political angle to the story the show is telling about veterans.

Meanwhile, Blumberg and Horowitz have big plans for the future. Citing Netflix and the binge-watch model as inspiration, Gimlet Media may soon flood your feed with several fictional options. “Hundreds? Thousands?,” Horowitz joked when asked how many of these shows he’d like Gimlet to produce per year. Blumberg was a bit more cagey about Gimlet’s ambitious plans. “We have one more show that’s going to launch in December that’s also doing something that hasn’t been done before. It’s sort of a genealogy, history show. Beyond that,” he says with a nervous laugh, “I don’t have much I can share with you. Fiction is an exciting place to be.”

Horowitz adds, “It’s the tippiest tip of the iceberg.”

The first episode of Homecoming premieres Wednesday, November 16, wherever podcasts can be found.